The Institute for Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES, pronounced "seascapes") is one of the four Institutes established nationwide in September 2006 as the new component of the second cycle of the DOE initiative Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC). The CSCAPES Institute has a two-fold purpose:

To accelerate the development and deployment of fundamental enabling technologies in high performance computing, by creating algorithms and software tools for key combinatorial problems in scientific computing at the petascale, and
To foster the next generation of researchers capable of effectively applying combinatorial techniques to scientific computing, by training graduate students and post-doctoral associates, conducting outreach workshops and tutorials, and publishing in the scientific literature.

The focus areas of CSCAPES are load balancing in parallel computation, automatic differentiation, and advanced methods for sparse matrix computations. To realize its goals, CSCAPES is committed to working closely with other SciDAC Institutes, Centers for Enabling Technologies, and Science Application Partnerships, as well as with relevant bodies in academia and industry, internationally.

The CSCAPES Institute is a collaborative effort among investigators from Purdue University, Old Dominion University, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Ohio State University, and Colorado State University. The Institute is funded by DOE's Office of Science.